


Probably going to sin again

by disenchanted



Series: This happy breed of men [2]
Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: (who are still enemies), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Class Issues, Drinking, Enemies to Lovers, Getting Together, London, M/M, court world vs tavern world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 18:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5976931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Percy goes to Hal Lancaster's birthday party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Probably going to sin again

**Author's Note:**

> This is a loose sequel to (or rather, another fic set in the same 'verse as) my previous modern 1HIV fic, [A Precedent](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5669833). Reading that one before this one might provide some context, but it's not strictly necessary. 
> 
> Thanks to [Lilliburlero](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero) for betaing.

In Delhi it was past three in the morning: in London, however, it was nine in the evening, and Harry was in London, where the early August sun was not yet down.  Harry had woken that morning, more promptly than he’d ever done while actually abroad, at eight Delhi time, or three London time; the day felt the longest he’d lived. That evening the greatest thing in the world to him, the most extraordinary and miraculous thing, would be to be in bed. Yet inexplicably, terribly, he was getting off the tube at Green Park and shouldering his way to the townhouse in which Hal Lancaster was celebrating his twenty-third birthday. He came to the conclusion that he was better off not going (anyway his father had sent over a gift of golf clubs or something already) at about the time he was welcomed into the hall, announced, and offered a trumpet flute of champagne from a tray.

‘Any chance of a G and T?’ he asked a passing waiter.

Just then a small boy—no, a sixth-former—with a long, ponderous face and a droopy eyelid said, ‘Hullo, Percy. My brother’s upstairs taking drugs, if you’re looking for him.’

‘What? No, I’m not,’ said Harry firmly, then: ‘Hi, John,’ then: ‘Which brother d’you mean?’ He hoped blindly that he would be given leave to wander off to play sozzled billiards with Tom.

‘Hal,’ said John, with a terrifying certainty: it was as if he had some reason to believe Harry would actually be looking for Hal. 

‘ _No_ , it’s all right, I’m just here to… Well, you’ll tell him many happy returns and all that? I’m just in and out, really; got back from Delhi this week and I’ve been up a day and a half now, I’m a w-w-walking corpse practically. —Look, take this,’ said Harry, and thrust the flute towards John, who accepted it with complaisance.

‘Oh yes, I’ll tell him,’ said John, handing off the flute to a waiter. ‘He’ll be sorry to have missed you, I’m sure.’

‘And anyway I think I contracted malaria or something—feeling a bit warm; maybe tapeworms—so I’d better be off—’

Halfway to the door Harry found that Ed Mortimer was clapping him on the shoulder and pulling him into an uneasily intimate sort of side-embrace. Mortimer cried: ‘Look who hasn’t texted me that he’s back! Why is it, Percy, that you’ve been in London and we’re only meeting at Hal Lancaster’s birthday party?’

‘I thought you would’ve been with that We-Welsh girl.’

‘As a matter of fact I _am_ , she’s here somewhere— Wouldn’t have thought, would you? But I’m decrepit and monogamous now; look how much can change in four months, you’d better not leave again….’ 

Mortimer, still half-clinging to Harry, craned his neck to search through the crush of people—mostly Christ Church knobs, the friends Hal’s father had chosen for him while he was at school, with a smattering of Hal’s father’s own friends, who were Christ Church knobs of an older generation—but did not find Catrin before the crush thickened at the foot of the staircase in the hall, and a tipsy chorus of ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ had begun. Hal was standing at the top of the stairs, holding one of the trumpet flutes in a manner that threatened a toast.

‘I wasn’t going to make a speech,’ began Hal, ‘but I thought I ought to assure you all—especially you, Dad, hello—that I did actually attend my own birthday party. Apologies for last year, by the way; I thought with the ice sculpture nobody would know the difference. But I’m much older and wiser now—my 2:2 will attest to that—and I possess knowledge and foresight enough to understand that if I don’t do what my father tells me it’ll be about a month until the Daily Mail publishes an article titled “Peer on the dole: how the most eligible bachelor in Britain lost everything”. So, ah, welcome all, and by my decree none of you are allowed to leave before you’ve got at least a magnum in you: and I mean you’ve got to _drink_ it, you filthy bastards, cheers!’

‘What a cunt,’ whispered Harry to Mortimer.

‘Sopping,’ whispered Mortimer to Harry.

What made the speech unbearable was that Hal didn’t look at all bad. He had the sort of face, youthful but not childlike, that came into its zenith at about age twenty-seven; he had his father’s definition about him, softened by a sheen of conscious charm that was all Richard Bordeaux, God rest his soul. He wore, insouciantly, a pale striped shirt unbuttoned nearly to the nipples, with a pair of Ray-Bans hung in the crevice. His yellow hair was burnished, speaking of a summer spent on the tennis courts. 

What right had Hal, Harry wanted to know? Harry had nothing but his wits, his stammer, and a couple of ruined castles in Northumberland. It was no consolation that Harry’s role with regards to the Lancaster family was to represent what Hal could be if he’d one iota of conscientiousness: Hal was the sort who always rescued himself at the last moment. In ten or twelve years Harry would be out. He supposed, however, that while he was still in he ought to have that G&T.

 

* * *

 

Probably there _was_ something to Hal’s unerring determination to humiliate his father at all costs. It was Harry’s insistence on pleasing his own father, to the best of his abilities, that had propelled him to the party; it was his guilty knowledge that what his father really wanted was a favour from Lord Lancaster that led him, after three or four G &Ts and a couple of cups of some sort of elderflower cordial punch with seed bits in, to go out into the communal garden to see Hal’s father.

In the garden was a tent stringed up with lights and decorated at points with magnolias. It housed a violin-cello duo playing something that sounded suspiciously like a rendition of Handel’s Water Music, and the several dozen partygoers who were too happily married to their nicotine addictions to stay in the house for more than twenty minutes at a time. A fug of smoke hung beneath the ceiling of the tent, sifting out from the sides, lying sickly over the scent of bouquets and moist grass. 

The chatter was high; Lord Lancaster was in the middle of boring a Northern Irish MP to death. Upon spotting Harry, who was pouring himself another cup of punch, he shook the MP off and made to approach. Harry had to drop the ladle to shake his hand, and noticed only afterwards that the ladle had fallen sideways into the punch. 

‘Do you like the punch?’ asked Lancaster. ‘The cordial was made at our place in Herefordshire; the recipe is improved from last year’s, I think. The trick seems to be to add in a hint of orange along with the lemon. The raspberries in the punch I fear may have proved a bit much…. Do tell me what you think. You did have last year’s?’

Unconsciously Harry licked at the raspberry seed stuck between two of his molars. ‘No, no, it’s very good. —Um, my father is sorry he couldn’t get away; he’s actually in Brussels at the moment, we-we’ve not even seen each other yet—’

‘Oh, quite, quite. Of course he’s welcome here if he’s ever in London…though I don’t think he often _is_. You haven’t been in England very long yourself, have you?’

‘About a week, yeah,’ said Harry. ‘I think I’m setting off again within the month, I’ve got a friend in the Czech Republic, he says it's cheaper to drink there than anywhere else and they eat a lot of potatoes, so I thought I might as well….’

‘Mm, the Czech Republic, is it? I thought Hal might have liked to spend a year or two in France, if he won’t do anything else, but a flat in Paris doesn’t tempt him. Won’t you pack him off to Prague in your luggage?’ 

Harry failed to think of a response that would conceal his terror at the prospect. It was a perverse relief, then, when Lord Lancaster went on to say, ‘Would you mind finding him and telling him I want a word? I’m sure he’s with that friend of his, the—who is he, the little—’

‘Right, Ed Poins, yeah, I know him. Only in passing, he was at Wa-Wadham, saw him at a bop or two. Strange that they’re getting on so well. … Not that I would know really, I haven’t seen either of them in six months. I did catch Hal’s speech tonight; it was, it was….’

Until then Harry hadn’t had cause to consider just how impossible it was to talk to the father of one’s social nemesis about the boy said nemesis was fucking. When those sorts of conversations involved a girl, however unsuitable, there was always a sort of wink-wink nudge-nudge camaraderie about it; the moment a man made an appearance it all went to hell. Ed Poins, who had clung on long past the shelf-life of the typical Charles Ryder figure, was past the cusp of unspeakability. Lord Lancaster had developed the expression of someone suffering from piles.

‘Yeah, um, I’ll see if I can’t find him,’ said Harry. Before making any move to leave, he went on: ‘My father wanted to ask you, actually, whether you wouldn’t like to come up to Warkworth for some shooting next week; there’ll be grouse to last till December, apparently, but you want first crack of course, there’s nothing like the twelfth.’

‘Hmm, hmm, fast approaching, isn’t it,’ said Lord Lancaster, with the vagueness of someone whom illness has rendered totally self-absorbed. Yet he seemed to recognise, still, that it might be wise of him to give a little quid for the quo. ‘I’m sure I can steal away for a day or two…. Shall I give your father a ring?’

As Harry stumped up towards the house again he thought that it was funny, how Lord Lancaster said ‘steal away’: it was as if he was just then realising it couldn’t really be done without committing an act whose name ended in -cide. Harry wondered how it could have possibly taken Lord Lancaster twenty-three years, when it had taken him as many minutes.

 

* * *

 

It was Poins that Harry found first; he was wobbling, pissed, out of an upstairs loo. Whenever Harry had occasion to look at Poins’ face, with its wide-set eyes and its perpetual wariness, he thought the same thing: _What does the fox say? Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding…_ A laugh bubbled up which Poins apparently mistook for ill-will; his long nose wrinkled.

‘You know what I was thinking?’ said Harry. ‘I was thinking of that song, you know, that goes, “What does the fox say? Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!”’

‘I know the one,’ said Poins thickly. He was familiar with Hal, of course, but only because Hal lowered himself so that an intimacy was possible; faced with someone similar who was more or less a stranger, his boldness shrivelled up. ‘Mate, mind if I get by?’

‘Hands off, Hotspur,’ came a dull drawling voice from above. Hal, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, was stumbling down the staircase, emerging onto the landing from the mysterious vacuum of the third storey. ‘I’m taking him away. We’re going to do something fun.’ As if it had just occurred to him: ‘Want to come along, Percy?’ 

‘No?’ said Harry incredulously. ‘I want to fuck off and go to bed. Even if I we-weren’t running on twenty hours of canned cappucinos, you could convince me to— to teabag a sheep, or something, sooner than spend more than five minutes in your company; it was bad enough being at school with you. Ed Poins is impressed, that’s fantastic—well, the thing is, I’m not gay, and I’m not a toady, so I don’t know wh-what it is you think I like about you.’

‘When they put the blood pressure cuff on at the doctor’s,’ said Hal, ‘does it just pop right off?’

Harry said, ‘Your father is looking for you. He’s going up to Warkworth for the twelfth; join him if you like, I wo-won’t be there.’

‘Only if I get to sleep in your bed,’ said Hal.

‘My bed’s in Islington,’ said Harry, wondering whether he meant it. He did _have_ a bed in a ridiculous flat just off Upper Street; he wasn’t sure if he would be more offended if Hal were to jerk off there, rather than in the musty old closet of a bedroom he stayed in when at Warkworth. What he was sure about was that Hal would enjoy it more: he supposed that that, above all, offended him. ‘You can’t claim that one, I’ll be asleep in it soon enough; I’m going while the tube’s still running.’ 

‘Oh, go, if you’re so put out,’ said Hal. ‘We’ll miss your great heart and noble spirit.’

Harry descended, and Hal and Poins stayed on the landing, consciously falling short of muffling their manic laughter. By the time Harry reached the ground floor they had begun to whisper.

 

* * *

 

On the walk back to his flat from Angel station, Harry figured it was an hour from sunrise in Delhi, and remembered wobbling out of nightclubs attached to resort hotels to see the sun rising pinkly in the haze. He had done the same thing in England (and in Scotland, and Ireland) and never felt so stupidly contented, filled up like a bag of air. Being in London, really anywhere south of the Peak District, made him feel like he was in one of those dreams where you’re trying to do something urgent and keep walking in the wrong direction. 

Harry was illuminated by headlamps: a supermini had turned down the narrow alley off Islington Green that terminated in his squat block of converted flats. The car pulled up alongside him, and the driver’s side window rolled down to reveal a man wearing a balaclava pulled halfway up his bearded face and holding, inexpertly, a handgun. Harry nearly laughed: the driver would have to reverse to get out of the alley.

‘Get in the car,’ said the driver, who was perhaps fifty, and whose blunt nose bore the broken blood vessels signature of a lifetime of ale-drinking.

‘What, are you going to shoot me?’ said Harry. He had been robbed twice before—once in Cape Town, by a man who had had to repeat himself several times in order for Harry to understand him, and once in Bolivia, by a really very cordial and pleasant thief impersonating a cab driver—and was still waiting to have an experience which he felt was genuinely dangerous. ‘For thirty quid and an Oyster card with five p on it?’ 

‘You’re going to want to do what I tell you, all right, _old chap_?’ said the driver. Certain large but nonpoisonous insects were more frightening: he sounded like a first-time actor auditioning for a part as a robber in a home insurance advert.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve said yes to one thing tonight and I’m not going to say yes to another. Fuck off back to your remedial petty criminal course.’

And so the rear doors opened and Harry was set upon by two younger men, also in balaclavas and probably sweating underneath, who took him by either arm and began to drag him round to the car. One of the men must have been six foot three, and nearly dislocated Harry’s shoulder; the other, shorter one could barely keep hold of Harry’s bicep. That one Harry attempted to kick away, though he succeeded only in eliciting a surprisingly weedy ‘Ow!’ And so Harry was stowed in the cramped backseat of the car, realising just then that he had to piss. Slowly, excruciatingly, the car backed out of the alley.

‘I’m going to piss on you,’ said Harry, to none of his three captors in particular. If the two younger men weren’t holding his arms fast he would have actually taken his cock out and let loose. 

‘Oh God, Percy,’ said the taller man, ‘just because we’ve abducted you doesn’t mean we want to be party to your weird sex fantasies.’ With one hand he pulled his balaclava off, mussing his curly yellow hair: for it was Hal. Of course! It was Hal, it was always Hal. 

‘Christ!’ said Harry. ‘Fuck! You fucking prick, fuck you! What do you wa-want?’ 

‘Don’t know just yet,’ said Hal amiably. To the driver he called: ‘What do you think, Jack?’

‘I think we want a drink!’ said Jack.

 

* * *

 

‘Shots,’ said Hal, leaning up against the bar. He slung his arm around Harry’s shoulder; Harry shook him off. ‘It’s my mate’s birthday tonight.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ said the girl behind the bar, who was buttoned up into the requisite black button-down and apron. It was late enough that her hair was coming loose from its high ponytail. By the tone of her voice, and her refusal to meet his eyes, it was apparent she knew Hal.

‘How about tequila, Hotspur?’ said Hal. He had, probably consciously, modulated his voice closer to ‘young London’ than ‘old Etonian.’ ‘Twenty tequila shots to start. Cheap stuff’s fine. Actually, make ten of them that spicy vodka with the gold flakes in.’

‘You know it’s not my birthday,’ said Harry to the girl, ‘it’s his.’

The girl said, ‘It's the same price no matter whose birthday it is.’

So this, thought Harry, as the girl began sullenly to slop tequila into neon-coloured plastic shooters, was where Hal got off to: a Wetherspoons near the Monument that looked like it had been converted from a bank's headquarters. Panelled walls and low-hanging chandeliers glittered incongruously over a sea of placards advertising a pint and a burger for £5 and Curry Club on Thursdays; the seventy-odd tables were occupied by an even mix of cheap thirty-somethings and pudgy old men in jumpers, though some interest was added by groups of students here and there who seemed to be taking advantage of the vodka specials. Wafting up from the floral-patterned carpet came the unmistakable scent of spilt ale.

The nook between the two corner windows seemed to be sole domain of Hal’s party. Jack took up the small sofa, and Poins sat on a wobbly wooden chair, his legs spread obscenely, scrolling through his Facebook feed on his phone. When Hal approached with the tray of shots, Jack’s eyes began to glisten, only slightly more in admiration for the drink than Hal’s bare, sinewy forearms (Jack’s left ear, Harry had noticed, was pierced with a silver hoop, but then he didn’t need that to know). 

‘To Hotspur, star of the north,’ said Harry, downing a shot of the spicy vodka with gold flakes in. 

‘What,’ said Harry, ‘you think I won’t drink to myself? Sooner me than you,’ and took a shot also. 

‘Another,’ said Poins, ‘to Harry’s piss fetish,’ and all four of them took another. 

‘How about one to the kidnapper?’ said Jack; they drank.

‘One to Hal’s single chest hair,’ said Harry; they drank again.

‘To the triplets Jack’s carrying,’ said Hal, with a nod to Jack’s gut. ‘Pity if they turn out like their father.’

‘The question is,’ said Jack, with a maw-splitting, spitty laugh that Harry generally identified with cabbies, ‘I’ll tell you what the question is, it’s who the hell’s their father?’ 

‘The chap who’s going to stand us the next twenty shots,’ said Hal; that was cue for Jack to take an exaggerated look around for the culprit before shouting in the direction of the bar. Jack’s manner of ordering prompted Harry to reflect that he hadn’t thought such an obviously gay man could be so astonishingly crude towards women. Not that Harry was categorically against being crude towards women—time and place for everything—it was just that chauvinism was so incongruous when paired with retro camp. 

‘To the spot of shite on the cock of the modern aristocracy,’ said Jack, holding his sixth shot aloft, ‘our very own Lord Derby!’ 

‘And one,’ said Hal, ‘to the syphilitic chancre: Lord Harry Percy!’ 

‘To the socialist revolution,’ said Poins.

‘To closing time,’ said Harry; and with that the tenth round was gone. 

He was beginning to feel quite drunk. Until then he hadn’t felt it for the exhaustion. The room seemed to have narrowed to the circle of blurred faces around him, smearing in and out of his vision; the chatter of a cramped, crowded room closed in on him. There was music being played over the pub’s sound system, but the only thing audible was a maddening thump-thump-thump-thump.

 

* * *

 

‘So,’ said Poins, once they had all settled down with pints of lager, ‘let’s play a game. We turn to the person to the right of us and ask them one question they’ve got to answer. I’ll start’—he swivelled bodily to face Hal, and rested his chin in his hand—‘How much money did you spend on drugs in the last month?’

‘Answering that question requires knowing,’ said Hal.

‘Guess,’ said Poins.

‘Five k, give or take,’ said Hal. ‘Probably less than Harry’s paying for his flat in Islington. My turn: Jack, what did you think about when you last tossed off?’

‘You think I wouldn’t have told you otherwise? Picture this, Hal’—Jack spread his hands as if illustrating the scene in the air—‘a nineteen-year-old, natural blond, pecs like peaches, arse all fuzzy, sat on a sofa and getting his balls licked by his mate.’ (There was a pinkness to Poins’ face which suggested that he had recently acted as the mate in question, probably to the natural blond on his right.) ‘Then he gives up, lets off a massive load of spunk on his mate’s face, and his mate’s going mad because the boy was meant to be getting up and sticking it in him just about then.’ 

‘Yeah, I saw that one on Pornhub,’ said Hal, ‘and the comment underneath it by “PlumpJack6969” saying, “Wish I had a sweet young thing like that to myself, winky face. I’m in London, anyone want a bear for dessert, winky face?”’ 

Jack, blustering, said, ‘I’m not as bad as that; I haven’t got two 69s.’

‘I sincerely doubt you’ve had one,’ said Hal. ‘For one thing the other digit couldn’t reach your cock for your stomach. Go on, ask Harry something.’

‘What,’ said Jack, ‘was the naughtiest thing our Hal ever did at school?’

‘Hal was a fucking monk,’ said Harry, swallowing a mouthful of lager. ‘Really, he wouldn’t have been caught dead tossing off, let alone shagging anybody. I think someone must’ve shown him a picture of tertiary syphilis and put him off it. I mean, there were boys having orgies in rafts after lock-up, and Hal we-went into the toilet to put on his pyjamas. God knows he wasn’t sitting on sofas having his balls licked.’

‘They’re always monks in the beginning, the randy ones,’ said Jack. ‘It’s repression, it’s just like Freud says: always comes shooting out later—if you’ll pardon my turn of phrase!’

‘Poins, here’s a question for you,’ said Harry. ‘Where do you get off, spending your time with these tossers? What’s in it for you?’

Shockingly quickly—so quickly that Harry took a moment to comprehend that he was speaking—Poins responded, ‘They’ll agree to go off and kidnap someone if I tell them it’ll be fun. That’s about it, yeah. … Hal, it’s your turn again. Tell me this, if we’re on the topic of Freud: would you really fuck your dad?’

That’s it, thought Harry, they were done for. Poins had shot a bolt into the heart of it; he’d ripped the cloth off things. Harry knew, much more than these smug pub-plebs, what it was like to be object of Hal’s anger; to be faced with a Hal who had wriggled out of his skin of affable acidity and decided to be really cruel. That of course was when Hal proved that he was—however he hated it (and he did hate it)—his father’s son.

But Hal laughed, raucously: he gulped down the last of his lager, slammed the empty mug onto the table, and said, ‘Only if I knew whether he would disinherit me for it!’

‘D’you mean,’ said Poins, plainly unaware of what he had escaped, ‘you would only do it if he _wouldn’t_ , or you would only do it if he _would_?’

‘Ah, ah,’ tutted Hal, ‘you only get one question. Your rules.’

‘Oh, fuck off, I’m going to take a piss. I’ll picture your face in the urinal bowl.’

As Poins staggered off in the direction of the toilets, Hal patted his pockets as if checking for something, then rose abruptly and said, ‘Right, time for a fag. Sit down, Jack, not with you.’ (‘Wouldn’t have thought so!’ said Jack.) ‘Harry, come with me, don’t pretend you aren’t still an incorrigible addict.’ 

Harry’s lungs ached for a cigarette. He thought vaguely, patting for shreds of insight in the swamp of obliterating drunkenness, that that was Hal’s power; he made you want the things you knew you didn’t want. 

 

* * *

 

It was August: the pavement in front of the pub was crammed with singles holding their pints in one hand and their fags in the other, shouting to be heard. With a wordless roll of the eyes Hal motioned past the line of shuttered chain cafes, down a narrow intersecting lane that dropped off abruptly into a cobbled passage. There they stopped in an archway leading to the courtyard of a block of flats, where besides the flame of Hal’s lighter all was dark. 

Hal had, Harry noticed belatedly, put two cigarettes between his lips and lit them both up at once. After a long puff, which he exhaled through his nose, he handed one over to Harry. 

‘It’s really kind of perverse,’ said Harry, after a couple of pulls. ‘What you do, I mean the fucking off to Eastcheap to do tequila shots with Ed Poins and whoever the fuck Jack is. I mean the thing is, there’s worse things you could do, you could be off whoring yourself out in Brighton or whatever, you could’ve gone the way of Richard Bordeaux and got AIDS. This just makes it look like you’re trying desperately hard at the whole reverse class-traitor thing and fucking it up anyway.’

‘Oh, God, shut up,’ mumbled Hal around his cigarette. ‘Just because we’re smashed out of our skulls doesn’t mean you can start howling about _reverse class-treason_. Which one of us just disappeared into the heart of fucking darkness for four months?’ 

‘ _The Heart of Darkness_ was in the Congo, you idiot,’ said Harry. ‘It’s literally a completely different continent.’

‘Anyway, who says I’m not having fun?’

‘Are you, though? —Don’t answer that, I don’t give a shit how you feel about things, it’s just that I’m the one who’s got to put up with my father bitching about having to put up with your father wishing you were working in the City, or whatever. You know your dad called you “wanton and effeminate?”’

‘He’s called me plenty of things,’ said Hal. ‘Most of them are true; he knows me fairly well.’

‘Not enough to know how to get you back in line, apparently.’

‘He knows me well enough to know he doesn’t really need to get me back in line, I’ll do it myself sooner or later. He’s pleased I’m giving him something to hate me for.’ 

With a last long exhalation Hal flicked the stub of his cigarette into the gutter, where it glowed redly for a moment before going out. He didn’t move to start back down the street. Harry silenced himself by sucking down what was left of his own cigarette, thinking that whatever he had bargained for, it hadn’t been standing in a backstreet in the City listening to Hal Lancaster talking about his psychologically sado-masochistic relationship with his father; he was drunk enough that he didn’t notice at first when the fag-end singed the skin between his first two fingers. After he dropped it he leant back against the brick wall behind him, hoping to maintain his equilibrium.

‘Ed and Jack will be gone soon enough,’ said Hal. ‘You, though…. Well, we’ve known each other for ten years, Floreat Etona and all that. You won’t go when they go, you’re condemned.’ 

‘Oh, no, I’m not,’ said Harry.

‘You’re here,’ Hal pointed out. His breath was humid and smelled like Marlboros and lager. Harry knew this because Hal had put his hand on the brick above Harry’s shoulder and leant in so that their foreheads touched, nearly. It had been a long time since someone had loomed over Harry. ‘You were in the First Eighth, you could’ve knocked me out and run…. You could’ve told your father that you wouldn’t fucking bother.’

‘Thought I might as well see you abase yourself.’

‘Who’s abased himself?’ 

Harry felt, against his lip and cheek, the blunt, stertorous passes of Hal’s breaths. Silently Hal was sweeping his open mouth over the hollow of Harry’s cheek, the line of his jaw, perhaps, once, the corner of his lips. No, Hal’s lips were over Harry’s lips, now; a hair’s-breadth away, hot. Hal would not tilt his head so that they touched. He knew that Harry was in it; that he could not, whatever he did, get away with his honour. Harry wondered whether Hal had ever kissed for the sake of kissing in his life.

‘Have it if you like,’ said Harry, and pressed his open mouth to Hal’s. 

The first kiss, however, was over before it began. Harry had put his hands on Hal’s shoulders and shoved him back so that he thumped against the other side of the archway. Harry cupped Hal’s long, slim neck so that his thumb was pressing into Hal’s trachea, cutting his breaths down to shallow whispers. Then he kissed Hal again, the way he liked, filthily and with no regard for grace. When he pulled back Hal was gasping rather, but defiantly, as if to say: Why _don’t_ you strangle me? Harry thought if he wasn’t so drunk he’d have been hard by now. He put a hand between Hal’s legs and found that Hal wasn’t, either, though he wriggled. 

‘You want to fuck me?’ said Harry.

‘Yes,’ said Hal.

‘Why?’ 

‘Might as well see you abase yourself.’ 

‘Why _now_?’

From farther up the street, insinuating itself into the cramped passage, came a nasally call of ‘Hal! Ha—al! Hal, you wanker, get back here! Jack wants you!’

Whatever had been building was broken now: Hal and Harry were in the world again. They shoved each other away, as they might have done at the end of a fight that had concluded in a draw. Harry’s mouth felt sour, cottony; the hangover was beginning already, asserting itself as the successor of his drunkenness. As he stumbled out of the archway he turned his head and spat into the gutter, just to clear his mouth of Hal’s spit. And it was all for nothing: directly they got back to the pub the girl came by to wipe their table down and tell them, ‘Hurry up please...’

 

* * *

 

When Harry got back to his flat he found he didn’t need to turn on the lamps to see. Pale blue light promising a brilliant day—picnics in squares, windows open, drinking outside at eleven in the morning—was slanting in from over top of the buildings across the street. The curtains, Harry realised, he’d left open; he hadn’t the heart to close them now, even as he tumbled across his bedroom floor tearing his clothes off. After he fell into bed, still in his pants and his socks, he lay for a long while watching the floaters in his eyes moving across the lightening ceiling. He had passed through exhaustion and out the other side: he was awake, he did not give a damn what time it was in Delhi, he was thinking about Hal Lancaster, the noises he made when he was short of breath and trying not to let on that he was.

From somewhere in the blankets Harry’s phone buzzed; @lancasterhal had posted a succession of pictures on Instagram. He had uploaded them in reverse chronological order, so that the first on his feed was a selfie he had taken with John in the garden tent, before his father's guests had arrived: his arm was around John’s shoulder and he was grinning for the camera, while John stared sardonically into the middle distance. The second was a shot of him (taken by whom?) sitting behind a three-tiered cake laden with strawberries and red syrup. The third was half of Harry’s own face, washed yellow with indoor light: he looked as though he was halfway through turning to look at someone who had called his name. The caption read, ‘Why is @hpercypercy here? Captive for the night…   #bday #rivo’.

It felt to Harry like having a mosquito bite on the arch of his foot, and wanting to scratch and scratch and scratch until it bled and there was no itch any longer, only pain. Even reaching into his pants and rubbing his hand over his cock did not help it. _Want to fuck me, why, why now. Floreat—heart of fucking darkness—abase yourself—you’re here._

‘Christ,’ Harry called out to no one in particular, to his upstairs neighbor, tossing off and meaning it now, ‘Jesus Christ … Jesus fucking Christ—’ 

Without meaning to he began to sing inwardly, as he had once done in chapel: _Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! / Bring me my Chariot of fire_ …  


He thought of making Hal choke on his cock, and came. When the sweat on his forehead began to cool he realised he’d got come on his blankets, and kicked them to the foot of the bed. Beneath him the mattress seemed to be spinning in jerky half-circles. The sun was brighter now, hot on his bare skin. He felt filthy with sweat and odour, he wanted a shower but could not get up, he thought if he did he’d vomit. What was it about indignity—?

Retrieving his phone from where he had pitched it, he tapped out a text that read, _About what you said last night_ , then fell back onto the bed. Just as he was beginning to doze off he felt the phone buzz where he held it on his stomach.

**Hal Lancaster (07:13)** Text me your address and I’ll come by in the evening after you’ve slept off your hangover. 8 pm? xx

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Now with more Instagram.](http://i.imgur.com/7PvRlk3.png)


End file.
